Sedition…

London, 1794.  Revolution creeps across the channel, coffee houses seethe with gossip and the City is full of upstarts, émigrés and speculators.  But even in unruly times, daughters need husbands.  For five City men, the question is how to get them.

The daughters.  Motherless Alathea, whose charms are grown disturbing, uses the whole of London exactly as she pleases.  Harriet, Georgiana, Marianne and Everina are cosseted at home, but home is not always a safe place.  As Claude Belladroit, piano-master, remarks, what’s the point of locking the shutters when danger comes through the front door?

In the shadow of Tyburn gibbet, Vittorio Cantabile, exile and instrument-maker, also has a daughter.  Born with a deformity her father cannot forgive, Annie is far from cosseted.  In her father’s workshop, resentments are fashioned as well as pianofortes, and dreams are smashed without mercy.

Fathers and daughters; mothers and daughters; husbands and wives; girls and boys; the pursued and the pursuing.  Whether in gilded drawing room or dusty workshop, when a city is infected with sedition, everything is reflected through a distorting prism of jealousy, revenge and sexual devilry.

Katharine Grant

Author of Sedition

Author Photo: Debbie Toksvig

in conversation with Theresa Breslin

Theresa:   I love the title. It has enormous impact - the way it sounds and the freight the word carries.

Katharine:   Titles are so important, aren’t they!  When I began work on this book, I called it the ‘Piano Book’, or the ‘Goldberg Book’, because it features both a piano and Bach’s variations.   But I remembered a previous conversation with an editor who listened patiently whilst I outlined a plot, then said, ‘but what’s the book actually about?’  Asking the same question of this book, the answer was clear.  Sedition.  Short and snappy, it stuck.

Theresa:   The novel is set in a very particular year.

Katharine:   Yes, a very particular year.   In Paris, the Terror came to gruesome climax; in London there were treason trials.  1794 was a year of political sedition in Europe and I liked the idea that domestic sedition was its mirror.   But I was also very taken with the discovery from Amanda Foreman’s excellent book that Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in Paris midst all the 1789 summer turmoil, was overwhelmed in her hotel not by rioting crowds but by tradesmen, including stay makers, and that she went to the opera.  As history unfolds, ordinary life goes on.   In Sedition, though the City coffeehouses seethe with émigrés, spies and speculators, domestic concerns still prevail.   I find that to be true.  Even on 9/11, though we were all shattered, those not directly involved bought groceries, made tea, helped children with homework, cleaned the loo.

Theresa:  Also, it’s close to the end of a century, which logically should make no difference, yet…

Katharine:   It was a time of transition:  classical music moving towards romantic – Mozart died in 1791, Schubert was born in 1797;  the pianoforte was taking over from the harpsichord; Wordsworth and Coleridge published the first edition of The Lyrical Ballads in 1798;  in 1800, Alessandro Volta invents the battery;  the industrial revolution was gathering pace.   There’s a nervous energy about the turn of the eighteenth century which made it very attractive as a setting.

Theresa:     The story is political as well as personal, seamlessly interwoven.

Katharine:   The ‘city’ men, fathers of five of the girls, congregate in a coffee-house that shipmasters, traders and activists frequent. The coffee-houses were conduits for gossip, political pamphlets circulated, and news, both British and foreign, was exchanged. They witness, read about and discuss current events, though always, always with an eye for trade.

Theresa:   One of the characters picks up a leaflet entitled ‘Pantisocracy and Aspheterism’. My computer spell check didn’t recognise these terms and couldn’t even make a suggestion as to what they might be!

Katharine:   A stroke of serendipity! When writing the book I happened to be reading a biography of Coleridge and came across this. It fitted perfectly.

(Comment from Theresa : This chimes with HG Celia Rees last post on Jan 18^th)

    

Theresa:   Tell me about the music. It’s integral to the story.

Katharine:   Music was a big and natural part of my life. I was brought up in very musical household. We all played musical instruments and our nanny, who never liked to waste time, taught me and my siblings to sing in parts in the bath.  My parents hosted marvellous musicians and we were allowed to mingle and listen to performances.  The musicians were so open and kind.  Sometimes they allowed us to play their instruments.  So music’s something I grew up with and is still a source of great joy in my life. I learned the Variations – or as many as I could master in the time – with my characters, and continue to learn them.  Practising is also a form of therapy.  I’m a big-time stresser!  Music, being all-encompassing, leaves no room for angsting about the boiler, the roof, the all important key that’s strangely missing.

Theresa:   I found the detail fascinating. The underarm pomanders as a deodorant.  The arches at Newgate becoming narrower as the condemned person approached the site of their execution.     

Katharine:   All true! I drew on the resources of Glasgow University library, e.g. dress pattern books and fashion. I discovered that shoes had garden scenes painted on their heels (Sigh from Theresa. ‘I have a pair with similar on their soles!)  I studied (lots of) paintings. I researched by ‘walking’ London and absorbing how it is today. I think it can be a mistake to block out the present. We can use the present to see what it was like in the past. In some ways the scene locations are not so different now: noisy, air polluted, raucous etc. 

Theresa:   There are laugh-out-loud funny bits which appealed to my sense of humour.  And twists of wit… The storyteller stating that the selection of the bass A string from the harpsichord was the most suitable to make a hangman’s noose for a scorned lover! 

Katharine:   Ah, indeed. That carried a punch.

Theresa:   In contrast with above - there is some very dark matter within the book.

Katharine:   Yes, very difficult themes.  But I was given some advice very early on by Michael Schmidt, the poet.  ‘Be brave’, he said.  To me, this didn’t mean courting dark themes for the sake of sensation; it meant going where the story had to go.  Alathea Sawneyford’s character, for example, has been formed by her experiences.  It makes her complicated, but also allows you, as a writer, to explore places you wouldn’t otherwise explore.

Theresa:   In The Literary Review, Jonathan Barnes talks of plait[ing] together comedy and tragedy with sly skill. Hard to plait?

Katharine:   Yes – he was referring to the concert scene.  It was hard, but actually, by the time I got to the concert scene I was so inside that book that the plaiting wasn’t conscious … When I found the voice for the book I realised that nothing could be purely description. It all had to add to the individual. I took out anything that was descriptive unless it revealed or reinforced character, so the plaiting – and pressing the delete button – had become second nature.

 

Theresa:   Would you like to talk a bit about voice and perspective in the historical novel? 

Katharine:   That’s what takes the time, as you’ll know only too well!  Voice and perspective are key to all novels.  It took me quite a time to find Sedition's voice.  Not too arch, not too knowing, not too intrusive.  As for perspective, that took months – years – of paring away until I reached the book’s core.  It became an obsession, especially after I read Virginia Woolf’s insight that the success (in writerly terms) of all novels lies “not so much in their freedom from faults - indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all - but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective".  That really gripped me.  As I wrote Sedition, I knew what was necessary and just hoped to goodness I’d found it!

Theresa:   I think you certainly did!

Sedition  by Katharine Grant [website] is published by Virago (UK) and Henry Holt (USA)                                                                                  
 

Notable History, by K. M. Grant

Music is notably absent (see what I did there) from most novels, historical or otherwise, except as a useful scene setter: a lyre in a Tudor romp; a piano in a Victorian parlour. I think even Dickens largely gives it a miss.

This was wise. As somebody once said, ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture: it’s a really stupid thing to want to do’. Stupid, probably. Tempting, absolutely - and not just writing. I recently tried to describe to my husband the delights of the Rhinemaidens’ song at the beginning of Act III of Gotterdammerung. Boredom in seconds. When I plugged in my iPod, he was charmed (well, as charmed as he ever is by Wagner, about whose genius we will never agree).

In his overview of my current obsession, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Peter Williams asks ‘what kind of language could convey the realm of the imagination opened up by its very opening bar?’ I agree. But writers capture that realm of imagination in different ways. Music isn’t only about describing the music itself; it’s an integral part of imaginative memory.

For example, I remember almost nothing about the film Elvira Madigan, but every time I hear the Andante of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 I see a field of spring flowers and two impossibly beautiful people in love tastefully doing what people in love often do.

It’s impossible to hear Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice without images of Disney’s Fantasia bubbling up. Poor Mickey! Sometimes the associations are not nice. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, is a player in A Clockwork Orange. Bach’s Passacalia and Fugue in C minor accompany the bloodbath in The Godfather, and I refuse to watch the Hannibal Lectern film in which, so I believe, the Doc does something frightful whilst listening to the Goldberg’s Aria.

It’s wonderful how music transcends its own time far better than books. Early novels are rightly part of the canon of literature, but who really reads Richardson’s Clarissa for pleasure? It’s stuck in the eighteenth century. The music of J. S. Bach (died 1750), on the other hand, still surprises and delights. Quite often, I’m listening to something unfamiliar and am amazed to find it’s not far short of three hundred years old.

Music is fluid and adaptable; it lives and breathes, so doesn’t date as words date. In some senses, there’s no such thing as historical music, apart perhaps from early operas. Once you’ve got over the shock of the big burly hero as castrato (listen and weep), Handel’s Tamburlaine is an ordeal verging on torture, particularly if the director insists on all the da capos. I take my hat off to modern audiences who pay good money to sit through it.

My work in progress, set in 1794, has five girls learning to play the Goldberg on a new-fangled pianoforte.

This is an unsigned pianoforte, made in 1795. The image comes from the Frederick Collection.

Part of my research is attempting to learn Variations myself, about which I'm writing a blog. The book is a historical novel, yet by moving the Goldberg onto the piano, I’m bringing it up to date, as it were. Old music played on a familiar instrument (even if my girls' pianoforte is hardly a modern Fazioli, see below) marries the past and present more easily than, for example, re-writing Walter Scott in modern idiom. I would never attempt to do that. (Do you have trouble with Walter? I'm afraid my attention soon starts to wander.)

Yet danger lurks in writing a historical musical, as it were. I’ll get into trouble for all manner of reasons: the variations were written for two manual harpsichord, not a piano; although the aria and two variations do appear in Sir John Hawkins' History of Music, there’s no record of an extant copy in London before the nineteenth century; it’s a work of difficulty far beyond five girls, at least three of whom are indifferently talented. Daunted? You bet. Disheartened? Occasionally. But the joy of writing about music is that just listening counts as work and I can never get quite enough of that.

Serendipity and the Shivers, by K.M. Grant

Serendipity plays as great a part in a novelist’s life as planned research. I was reminded of this through a contribution to the elegant, provocative and completely independent (no advertisers, no sponsorship) Scottish Review, an on-line newspaper edited by the inimitable Kenneth Roy.

The contributor is Michael Elcock, born in Forres, who made his career in Canada. In the winter of 1986/87, he and his wife, Em, visited Prague and saw a ‘subjugated, fearful people living in a cold, grey city devoid of spirit’ but Em managed to get the last two tickets for the Christmas concert in the Dvorakhalle, the Prague opera house. This is what they witnessed:

‘The magnificent old Bohemian concert hall, with its crystal chandeliers and plush seats, was packed. The concertmaster came onto the stage in a magnificent red jacket, and spoke to the children in the audience. A lady beside us translated. “All the children have brought bells,' she explained. “The concertmaster is telling them that they must not ring their bells until he gives the order. On no account.”
The musicians played magnificently. The choir sang beautifully. The children rang their bells with an attention to the concertmaster's instructions that would have been rare in western Europe; only when the conductor told them to and at no other time. When the concert was finished the concertmaster came to the front of the stage and stood for a moment, looking over the audience. Then he made an announcement in a soft voice. An audible gasp went through the hall. Even though we spoke no Czech we could feel an electricity in the great old hall.
We turned to the lady beside us, our translator. “We are going to sing the Czech national anthem,” she whispered. “We are not allowed to sing it; not since the Russians came, not since the Germans before that. It has been banned for years.”
The orchestra began to play and everyone stood, and we stood with them. The voices rose until the crystal rang in the chandeliers overhead. We did not know the words, but that didn't matter. The music was uplifting and ethereal and as we looked around we could see that there were tears running down all the faces. It was a remarkable thing and we were there.’




I haven’t witnessed anything quite like that. As for many History Girls, my shivery moments have mainly come through seeing or touching something old, thus feeling, rather than seeing, history. I had a major shiver, for example, during a visit to the Parker Library at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where my older daughter and I were allowed to turn a medieval page or two and see the elephant in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Maiora in the flesh, as it were.  If you see it, you'll see it's very fine.





Music, though, produces shivers in a different league. I wish I’d been present at the first performance of Beethoven’s First Symphony. The dominant to tonic chord sequence, not even in the expected key must have been a real shocker. I like to think I’d have recognised the composer’s genius straight off, but would I? Perhaps I’d have been appalled since I don’t think, despite my best efforts, I’m actually very good at novelty. I’ve only just come round to patent shoes and block colours. Nevertheless, whether I liked Beethoven’s innovation or not, I’d certainly have had that shiver, and been glad I was there. I also wish I’d experienced Queen in one of their early concerts, perhaps in Liverpool in 1979. Missed opportunities make me shiver, too.

Queen, 1979 album cover

But one opportunity was not missed. In March 2000, my husband and I went to an extraordinary performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations played by Murray Perahia at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall. What was it about that concert? I don’t really know. The music was familiar, the pianist too. Yet it was a shivery thing from start to finish. People who went still ask ‘were you there?’. As a result of these shivers, I began to listen to the Variations rather compulsively and, inevitably, to set them into a novel. And even that’s not quite enough. In a dotty way, I now want to master at least the mechanics, an ambition more doomed to failure than the HS2 project. I’m not, of course, expecting to be able to shiver with delight at my playing, nor even to experience a connection with Bach, who would certainly shudder at my awful technique. Just to feel the shape of some of the Variations under the fingers will be enough. My vague and bumpy progress can be found on my blog, and very vague and bumpy it is too. Don’t worry, though, if you happen to be a neighbour or a passer-by: our piano has a silencing facility. I know a shiver of horror when I see one.